Software looks, to the layman, as very hard to understand. The infrastructure concerns of external dependencies are hard; I spent a full day configuring a build

Software looks, to the layman, as very hard to understand. The infrastructure concerns of external dependencies are hard; I spent a full day configuring a build server the other day. We persevere despite these things. I doubt that the open source hardware community will ever be even a tenth the size of the software community, but if it can be large enough it can have amazing knock-on effects. Look at the outsized effect even simple things like the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone have. They're reference boards slapped together out of commodity parts, but represent a very real gateway to software and hardware hacking to many people.